Owen Sheers at his home in mid Wales. Photograph: Dimitris Legakis/Athena Pictures

Owen Sheers’ fourth novel is a journey into male bereavement, grief and guilt. Michael Turner is a young and ambitious writer, embarking on a biography of an eminent neurosurgeon who is trying to locate the part of the brain responsible for empathy. Much as this might signal the novel’s preoccupation with masculine sensibilities, it is not as clumsy as it sounds. Michael is struggling to cope with the death of his wife, Caroline, killed in a drone strike while making a documentary about Pakistani jihadists; at the same time, he has become friendly with his new neighbours, wealthy Josh Nelson, a Lehman Brothers banker, and his perfect family. Michael is “adept at fitting into the lives of others”, and the Nelsons are soon doting on him, showing him off at parties, allowing him to babysit their bright young daughters.

The novel opens with Michael’s discovery that the Nelson house is apparently empty and unlocked. As he ventures, puzzled, deeper into the house, haunted by half-glimpses of his own past and his wife’s spectral presence, much of the story leading up to this point unfolds. It is a moment of tension sustained for more than half the book. When the tension breaks, it does so in a cruel and brutal way, twisting a knife in the wound of Michael’s grief, and throwing him together with Josh in a curious relationship of complicity, secrecy and guilt. Both men are anxious that their secrets should not become known, while the reader is left wondering who will find out what.

This leads the novel into some slightly awkward sequences of old-fashioned amateur sleuthing involving VHS surveillance tapes and soil residue analysis, a narrative line that sits uncomfortably in a novel whose main concern is how men cope with the death of people close to them.

The web of enforced secrecy in which Josh and Michael find themselves entangled contrasts with the quest for openness that drives the other guilt-ridden male in this novel, Daniel, the remote pilot of the drone that killed Michael’s wife. Having seen, from his Nevada bunker, the devastation his actions have caused, he feels compelled to write to Michael and unload his feelings of remorse. Michael, uneasy at first, becomes hungry for knowledge. He wants to know what the man who killed his wife looks like, what he dreams about, whom he loves. A curious polarity develops between the need to know and the need to suppress. In his own case, Michael’s survival strategy depends on preventing others from knowing what he is really feeling. It is little wonder he abandons his book about the neurosurgeon.

Although Daniel’s story, as we follow it, peters out a little, it serves to reinforce the theme of moral and emotional complicity. The novel’s strength, however, lies in the way it charts the relationship between widower Michael, “reticent with grief, a freelancer adrift on the hours of the day”, and the model of domestic happiness next door. If Sheers has set himself a formidable task in asking us to care about a merchant banker, he has a somewhat easier task with the likable Michael, an innocent thrust by circumstances into a form of grieving usually reserved for the old. “There was a birth into maturity beyond having children or losing your parents,” he observes, “It was the birth of an amputated love.” In the end, we care about all the characters in this compelling, thoughtful novel.

• Gerard Woodward’s Vanishing is published by Picador. To order I Saw a Man for £11.99 (RRP £14.99) go to bookshop.theguardian.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99.

‘Something about the Black Mountains lends itself towards myth and magic, folklore and fiction. What exactly, I’m not sure,’ says Oliver Balch. With author and poet Owen Sheers as his guide, he aims to find out